Damien Enright: Bananas, bulldozers and the miracle of uplands water

But what is still growing is fresh and green, and silvery with rain drops shining in the cloud-piercing sunlight

A commercial banana plantation in the Canary Islands. The miracle of water on dry uplands is evident. Similar plantations on La Palma were subsumed by lava in the recent volcanoes

I believe the weather in Ireland during recent weeks has been “glorious”. So I am told when I phone friends at home. Here, in La Gomera, it’s raining so, by local standards, it’s glorious too. Looking out the bedroom window this morning, it was captivating to see how the brown shelter-less fields (now cleared of the banana trees that up to two years ago occupied them) were now black, once black gold for the farmers, now gold whatever colour it is, now re-zoned as development land.

But what is still growing — and there is still growth everywhere, wild plants and weeds, some left to survive until they’re bulldozed, some sprung up almost overnight — is fresh and green, and silvery with rain drops shining in the cloud-piercing sunlight. The chiffchaffs sing: they chorus especially enthusiastically, birds so tiny and well camouflaged that we almost never see but know, by their constant chirping that they are there. They inhabit the mango and avocado trees that are still cultivated and harvested along the camino that leads from the road into our house, and the banana plantations still tended and nurtured by regular irrigation.